Introductory essay

Summary

In his Autobiography (1889), T. H. Huxley, the Victorian biologist, agnostic (he invented the word), and leading populariser of science, tells us of his ‘untiring opposition to that ecclesiastical spirit, that clericalism, which in England, as everywhere else, and to whatever denomination it may belong, is the deadly enemy of science’ - an opposition that was one of the chief motivating forces of his life's work. Huxley's image of a necessary conflict between two deadly enemies became the received account of the relations between science and religion in the nineteenth century. In this ‘battle’, the turningpoint is supposed to have come when Huxley confronted and routed Bishop Wilberforce, the opponent of evolution, at the British Association meeting in Oxford in 1860. From a twentieth-century perspective, perhaps coloured by the recent ‘Creationist’ controversies in America, it is easy to assume that Wilberforce was a Biblethumping Fundamentalist totally opposed to scientific methods of investigation. It comes as a surprise to find that Wilberforce's objections to Darwin's theory were mainly scientific, that he had many leading scientists on his side, that he skilfully picked out all the weak points in Darwin's theory, and that his basic assumption was that science and religion were necessarily in harmony, a harmony which Darwin's theory threatened to disrupt. His review of Darwin's Origin of Species in the Quarterly Review finally comes round to considering the opposition between the theory of evolution and the Creation story in the Bible, but this is not the main ground of his attack on Darwin.